This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Sci Vo: Man! It turns out, no matter how ace I was at compressing the technical stuff, there was just no way of making it interesting, so I pulled it:
There are five main technologies: animated GIFs, dynamic HTML, Java, Shockwave/Flash, and SVG. Animated GIFs are easy to make, but they have a large filesize for their effect, because they rotate through frames of pixel graphics (defined in terms of individual dots). Dynamic HTML is very limited; it just changes the placement of images on a webpage. Java applets are very flexible — they can do pixel graphics, vector graphics (defined in terms of lines and shapes), and even interactive elements — but they require more technical expertise, because Java is an actual programming language. Flash and Shockwave play 2-D vector graphics animations with sound, with Shockwave allowing more interactivity, so they're efficient in filesize for what they do; they can also be streamed. The newest form is animated SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics.
Should Seth Mac Farlane's Cartoon Cavalvade of Comedy be here? It's on the web, but it's not produced in Flash. In fact, the videos themselves are simply streaming video files instead of swfs.
